What was the catalyst for launching iplicit?
Our founder, Ian Andrews, says iplicit was born out of ’20 years of pain’ building and implementing other companies’ finance and ERP systems. Having run a successful ERP implementation consultancy for over two decades, he realised that the way these systems were designed was fundamentally flawed.
He could see the entire ERP market was stacked against the customer. Systems were far too expensive, costing millions. ERPs would take months (if not years) to implement. Not to mention they were overly complex and disruptive, particularly for mid-market businesses.
Imagine the same car arriving to a mechanic’s shop, time after time, in 10,000 parts. The first 9 months is spent building the same rolling chassis, before the mechanic can even think about customising it to the customers’ needs. This is essentially what was happening to businesses with ERP implementation. Only for these so-called ‘state-of-the-art’ systems to break or require ongoing repairs and patchwork once they were up and running. Bluntly speaking, businesses were being mugged.
Ian knew there had to be a better way, and this is what led him to develop iplicit. In 2013, he used his own money to start building a rapid-deployment, ready to go, pure-play cloud solution. One that had its customisation in the data, not in bespoke code. And one that boasted the power of a complex, enterprise scale ERP, but at a cost that would be accessible to SMEs, which were in dire need, but faced tougher budget constraints.
I met Ian in 2017 through a friend on my kids’ school run. He had a great product that was ready for launch, but no one know what iplicit was. The missing piece of the puzzle was customers. Luckily, I knew the founder of legacy finance software firm Exchequer – a man named Rob Steele – from one of my previous business ventures in the noughties.
Exchequer had been sold to Iris, and later sold to Advanced, which had seemingly let it ‘hang out to dry’ without a clear and affordable path to cloud for its customers. We knew this because Rob had been inundated with calls from ex-Exchequer customers – predominantly from mid-market organisations – who were in dire need of a solution with cloud functionality and real-time data consolidation. Together, we put the original ‘Exchequer band’ back together and hatched a plan to bring iplicit to the UK’s mid-market.
Tell us about iplicit. What it is, what it aims to achieve, who you work with, how you reach customers and so on?
iplicit is a cloud accounting platform that’s been purpose-built for the UK’s mid-market. That is, organisations with around 30-500 employees.
For startups and fast-growth tech/ SaaS businesses that have outgrown their entry-level cloud solutions, iplicit delivers more advanced controls, reporting and accounting functionality. This is essential as these businesses grow and their finance teams’ needs become more complex. For example, multiple legal entities, group consolidation or automation for payments.
iplicit also provides a more modern, future-proofed solution for the tens of thousands of organisations still reliant on legacy, ‘on-prem’ finance systems, such as education and public sector bodies. With outdated systems and manual spreadsheets, mid-market finance teams are spending as long as four weeks trying to complete month-end accounts. Stress and overwork aside, this simply isn’t commercially sustainable as the world becomes increasingly digitised, regulatory bodies expect more real-time reporting, and budgets need be tracked and accounted for at a granular level.
How does iplicit answer an unmet need?
iplicit is disrupting the mid-market finance space in the same way Netflix took down Blockbuster. Netflix took Blockbuster's outdated, cumbersome and often punitive business model of long waits and ‘late fees’ and gave the power back to the customer. Sign up and watch what you like. If you’re not happy, leave as you please. Instantly available, with high levels of value and low levels of cost.
In many ways, before iplicit, the accounting software market was eerily similar. Multi-year contracts that locked businesses in, often with price hikes after a certain period, in the knowledge that the customer had no alternative. Strict right to use (RTU) licenses that held critical data captive and threatened massive exit fees, should customers want to leave.
We wanted iplicit to be customer-centric, first and foremost, and so we said no to all of this. No multi-year contracts. No RTU licenses. We'll help you leave just as easily as we'll help you join. Born in the cloud, iplicit can be implemented in a fraction of the time of higher-end enterprise-level systems, meaning less disruption for finance teams embarking on digital finance transformation.
iplicit now serves more than 38,000 daily users in over 2,000 UK mid-market organisations. Since launching in 2019, we’ve continued to expand our customer base rapidly, now serving organisations in sectors such as tech, education and multi-academy trusts (MATs), housing associations, non-profits and more.
How has iplicit evolved since its launch?
iplicit launched in 2019, and since then, a lot has changed.
Our initial plan was to marry up our shiny new tech with the original Exchequer team to ‘rescue’ its old customer base. Exchequer was known for bringing Windows to a disk operating system (DOS) world. iplicit would be bringing cloud to the on-prem world. The Exchequer salvation, of sorts!
In the beginning, we thought we’d be going after around 1,000 customers at £6,000 a year and building a £6M a year company. With a view to build, scale and sell it on. But we learned very quickly that the market opportunity was far bigger than we’d imagined. We realised that there are tens of thousands of mid-market organisations in the UK still reliant on outdated, on-prem finance systems. iplicit wouldn’t become the Exchequer salvation. It would become the on-prem salvation!
In the UK, one of the largest incumbents in the game, Sage, occupied a significant portion of the on-prem market share. Our intel indicated that it had hundreds of thousands of sites, around 75,000 of which were in the mid-market. But Sage had seemingly dropped a royal ball here, by not having an acceptable, purpose-built cloud solution for its mid-market customers in the UK.
So, we completely redefined our market and proposition. We expanded and invested in our product. It was no longer about targeting 1,000 sites at £6,000 a year. Our average contract value was closer to £20,000 a year, with a target market of 100,000 sites. We realised, soon after launch, that if we captured just 25% of this market, we’d be looking at £500M a year. Or £1B ARR if we captured 50%. That’s when we realised, we had metaphorically rolled six sixes, and things were about to get interesting!
From 2019 to 2022, we grew our headcount from 9 to 37 and hit our first customer milestone of 500 organisations on the platform, with 3,000 daily users. Fast forward to today, and we now have a team of 150 and over 38,000 daily users. We’ve achieved six consecutive years of triple-digit revenue growth, with 113% year on year (YoY) growth in 2024. This secured us a spot on the Financial Times’ FT1000 for two years in a row (2024 and 2025), marking us as one of Europe’s fastest growing businesses.
Tell us about the working culture at iplicit?
As a hypergrowth startup, we’ve invested heavily in creating a culture where talent can thrive no matter where they are based, whether that’s in Edinburgh, Exeter or internationally. Our flexible culture has allowed us to achieve this, with over 90% of our people having the option to work fully remote.
In many ways, Covid was a catalyst for this remote-first culture. It has allowed us to hire the best people up and down the country and expand at a pace that wouldn’t have been possible with a strict office-based model. Our people enjoy not having to endure long commutes, not being micro-managed and having the autonomy to produce results. Staff gather in the summer and at Christmas for an update on our North Star targets, along with more regular team building activities and social events for different teams throughout the year.
Culturally, we are akin to a cause-led faction. Our mission is to displace the Big Tech incumbents (Sage, IRIS, Access) and disrupt the world of mid-market accounting software. Our people are passionate about this cause, and it’s created this incredible energy throughout our organisation. We don’t have to knit pick about staff being in the office every day for 9AM sharp. We focus on what matters: outputs, morale, communication, and above all, happiness.
In my view, building a hypergrowth business goes hand in hand with creating a people-first, trust-based work environment. We’re recognised for our strong company culture, too. In 2024, we were named by the Sunday Times as a top 10 ‘Best Place to Work’.
How are you funded?
Starting out, iplicit was bootstrapped with £18.5M worth of personal investment by the management team. Our initial focus was breathing life into the business by building our customer base, generating sales, and expanding our team.
In 2024, two major figures in the B2B software space joined iplicit as investors and advisors. Øystein Moan, former CEO of Visma, who oversaw its growth in enterprise value from less than €50M ARR to over €2.5B ARR. And Nic Humphries, Executive Chair at Hg, who has focused exclusively on software and technology for 28 years and currently has a portfolio exceeding £150B in value.
In January 2025, we secured our first external institutional funding round – a £25M investment from leading technology growth investor One Peak. We received 58 expressions of interest for this raise but chose One Peak for several reasons. One Peak is a laser focused fund, with $2B under management – and only 25 portfolio companies, many of whom have trodden the path we are on – making it smaller than many of the others that were bidding. However, it became the obvious choice due its in-depth market knowledge, exceptional operational assistance post investment, and track record of taking companies of our size to over £100M ARR.
What has been your biggest challenge so far and how have you overcome this?
I wouldn’t say that there has been one definitive challenge I’ve had to overcome. In my experience, life is a never-ending series of challenges.
In building seven different organisations, the challenges I have faced have always been largely the same: establishing a core team, breaking into a market as an unknown, and recruiting talent to join your cause – when you don’t have a reputation, and you can’t pay as much as the corporate opportunities.
What does change as you grow is how you handle them. With experience, I’ve learned and gained the confidence to aim higher, think bigger, and address challenges sooner. Building a successful organisation is never easy. But experience is invaluable when you’re doing it. You need to learn how to effectively tailor your response to every (inevitable) hurdle, and a lot of this comes with time.
What’s in store for the future?
Having delivered £6.6M ARR in 2024 – exceeding our enhanced target – we are now on track to deliver £12.4M ARR or more this year. Looking ahead, from 2026 to 2028, our trajectory is looking like £20M, to £35M to over £50M ARR, across that period.
We plan to take the lead above all other vendors in the UK mid-market accounting software space, too. In 2024, we outsold our closest competitor by almost 2:1, so this year, we aim to make this ratio much larger. We’ll achieve this by continuing to expand our accountancy and partner reseller network, as well as enhancing and investing in our product. We will soon be introducing new AI enabled reporting and analytics tools, for example, and doubling down on AI across our organisation. Not just with aspects of our product, but also to assist the way we operate as an organisation internally and when supporting our customers.
Headcount wise, we’re at 150 now, with plans to add 50 new team members this year across engineering, support, sales and marketing. By 2028, we expect to be a team of circa 300.
And in terms of global expansion, our priority is maintaining our great momentum in the UK for now. In 2027, when we have exceeded £20M ARR, we’ll likely consider entering the US market via a network of accountancy partners.
What one piece of advice would you give other founders or future founders?
I live by three mottos in business.
Firstly, cash is king. In a startup environment, it all boils down to sales. If you don't breathe oxygen into a business, it will die.
Secondly, grasp the nettle. It doesn't matter what the problem is – whether it's a challenge with a business partner, an underperforming employee, a bug within your tech. You need to nip it in the bud immediately. Otherwise, the nettle is only going to get bigger, and the pain (or fallout) is only going to be worse in the long run.
And finally, the quality of your people is everything. It doesn't matter what you do, or how brilliant your solution is. If you don't have an exceptional team of people around you that can execute your vision – and rally behind it when times are tough – your business will either remain stagnant, or you will just build mediocrity without scale. Think long and hard about the leadership team you are building and the quality of candidates you are recruiting.
And finally, a more personal question! What’s your daily routine and the rules you’re living by at the moment?
I believe in boundaries and balance. That said, nothing great is ever achieved without hard work. My working day is typically 12 hours, 09:00 - 21:00.
And I’m not a morning person! We see a lot on social media about “my 5-9 before my 9-5”. The need to get up at 05:00 and be in the gym before the day starts. All of that passes me by. I graft hard in the day and then I switch off and focus on non-business pursuits for the weekend. Not quite the glamorous life people peddle on social media. Maybe they’ve cracked it and I haven’t! But in my experience, it takes years of hard work to build a high performing army of talent, and I’m quite happy to do just that.
My daily routine is typically: wake up, work flat out all day, and get some steps in at night after dinner. My weekends are spent with family, playing sport, and trying to get some time on a motorbike or two.
Lyndon Stickley is the CEO of iplicit.
